LABOR WATCH ● APRIL 2010

The NEA Pays to Play: Buying Influence With ACORN and Other
Leftwing Groups

By RiShawn Biddle

Summary: Desperate to maintain its political influence, the National Education Association (NEA) is using philanthropy to build political alliances with left-leaning nonprofits such as ACORN and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. The NEA hopes grassroots activists and liberal special interests will back its efforts to protect the public sector’s best-compensated employment—public school teaching—and beat back reform challenges that are attracting support from Democrats not beholden to organized labor. But the NEA’s gift-giving strategy can backfire when its allies are caught up in controversy and scandal or oppose the very policies the NEA holds dear, reports education expert RiShawn Biddle.

America has plenty of public employee unions that can throw their weight around, but the biggest is the National Education Association, which can rally its rank-andfile members to lobby mayors and school boards, legislatures and Congress. Since the 1960s, the NEA has used its campaign clout and its monopoly powers over collective bargaining to make public school teaching the best-compensated public sector job in the country. And the NEA’s 3.2 million members are its best-known and most feared lobbyists. They can get a bill passed or defeated by mobilizing their forces outside a statehouse (and before the TV cameras) or inside a classroom, where they bond with parents who can be their advocates.merica has plenty of public employee unions that can throw their weight around, but the biggest is the National Education Association, which can rally its rank-andfile members to lobby mayors and school boards, legislatures and Congress. Since the 1960s, the NEA has used its campaign clout and its monopoly powers over collective bargaining to make public school teaching the best-compensated public sector job in the country. And the NEA’s 3.2 million members are its best-known and most feared lobbyists. They can get a bill passed or defeated by mobilizing their forces outside a statehouse (and before the TV cameras) or inside a classroom, where they bond with parents who can be their advocates.

The $377 million in dues that the NEA forcibly collects each year from teachers as payment for its services – a sum even greater than the $344 million that flows into the Service Employees International Union – gives the union the kind of financial heft other unions envy. Much of this money does not go into collective bargaining but fattens NEA campaign war chests, which the union and its affiliates deploy during election campaigns. The NEA took in an estimated $56.9 million that it spent on local, state and national political campaigns during the 2007-2008 election cycle, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. This made the NEA the nation’s single-biggest campaign contributor for the 2009-2010 election period, the NEA has raised another $15 million to date – double the amount raised at the same time two years ago. This fundraising prowess is why Harvard University education scholar Paul Peterson declares that the NEA is “in a position to
tell state legislatures what to do."

But these days, the NEA, along with the American Federation of Teachers, no
longer has a stranglehold over education
policymaking. Thanks to the efforts of the school
reform movement and backers suchs the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation, many politicians have
become backers of more-rigorous curriculum
standards, stronger accountability measures, school
choice alternatives, and improvements to the quality
of the nation’s teacher corps. The NEA has
especially lost support within the Democratic Party
– which has long benefited from the union’s largess
– as centrist school reformers have won over
President Barack Obama.

The NEA’s changing fortunes were most apparent in March when Obama and U.S.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan lent their
support to a school district in Central Falls, Rhode
Island. It fired its entire high school teaching
staff when they refused to support a plan intended
to overhaul the school’s abysmal academic
performance. (Though some of the teachers may get
their jobs back.)

The Obama Administration has especially angered the NEA with “Race to the Top,” its school reform initiative that invites states to compete for $4.3 billion in federal stimulus dollars if they implement education reforms, including lifting restrictions on the use of student test score data in evaluating teacher performance. This particular provision has angered the NEA, which until recently has insulated its members from all but the weakest forms of evaluation. NEA policy czar Kay Brilliant complained in a letter to Secretary Duncan that it was “inappropriate to require that states be able to link data onon
student achievement to individual teachers for the
purpose of teacher and principal evaluation.”

These developments are forcing the NEA and the AFT to bolster its coffers and
rally members against adopting such requirements.
But the unions are losing ground. In November 2008,
in spite of threats from the NEA’s California
affiliate, the Golden State struck down a state law
that banned the use of test scores in teacher
evaluation. Since then, other states, including
Tennessee, Massachusetts, and Nevada, have followed
suit.

As its direct influence over Democratic office-holders has begun to sputter,
the NEA has hit upon a new strategy. It is beginning
to use its resources to cement alliances with
nonprofit special interest groups that are major
players within Democratic Party politics. Making
financial contributions to left-leaning interest
groups helped the NEA build a coalition against the
No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. As an increasing
number of education reform initiatives face voters
and legislators in 2010 and beyond, the union is
once again looking for help from its old allies.

Blackboards and Greenbacksks

In the four years between fiscal years 2005-2006 and 2008-2009, the NEA has
increased its donations to nonprofits by nearly a
six-fold, from $4 million to $26 million. In
2008-2009 alone, the NEA ladled out $360,000 to the
“labor rights” group American Rights at Work –
best-known for its lobbying for the curiously-named
Employee Free Choice Act. It also contributed
$450,000 to Health Care for America Now (HCAN),
which rallies grassroots support for President
Obama’s health care proposal. HCAN partners include
the Communications Workers of America and the United
Auto Workers. Until recently, the NEA was also a
prime sponsor of the Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the community
activist group whose alleged voter fraud, advice on
tax-dodging and other misdeeds have haunted the
Obama Administration and Democratic Party activists.
The NEA reports on its tax forms that it gave ACORN
$396,452 in 20062007 and 2007-2008 for “nonpartisan
voter registration” and “community education”
activities.

NEA financing for “nonpartisan” research dovetails nicely with its opposition
to school reform. Between 2004-2005 and 2008-2009,
the union gave more than $1.3 million to the
Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington-based
think tank. During that time, EPI and its
white-bearded president, Lawrence Mishel, produced a
steady stream of studies taking aim at school
reformers. Their reports cast doubt on education
reform-minded researchers such as Manhattan
Institute scholar Jay P. Greene and Urban Institute
researcher Christopher Swanson (now with the
research division of the publisher of Education
Week) that revealed that states and school districts
inflated high school graduation rates – and hid the
nation’s dropout crisis.

What does the NEA receive in exchange for its donations? It gains access to
research that it can use in its own advocacy and
that will further the efforts of its state
affiliates to rally grassroots support. As Joe
Williams, the founder of the school reform-minded
Democrats for Education Reform, pointed out in a
2006 report, the NEA can conduct stealth campaigns
on behalf of its position. It can attempt to spin
the public while “leaving the public unaware of the
organizations’ financial ties to the union.”

More importantly, NEA donations buy critical support from organizations that
might otherwise support elements of the school
reform movement. This includes the charter school
movement –which has earned the ire of both the NEA
and the AFT for improving academic achievement among
poor black and Latino children without the need for
burdensome teacher contracts – and the teacher
quality movement, whose acolytes include Wendy Kopp,
founder of the successful alternative teacher
training group Teach for America, and Washington,
D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. (The effort
by the NEA and the AFT to organize charter school
teaching staffs was covered last month in Labor Watch. Michelle Rhee was profiled in Labor Watch’s January 2009 edition).

Even as charter school advocates and teacher quality activists have won support
from civil rights leaders such as Al Sharpton and
the National Council of La Raza, the NEA has kept
most of its beneficiaries, including the
Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, in the fold.
Says Mike Antonucci of the NEA watchdog outfit
Education Intelligence Agency: “You don’t bite the
hand that feeds you.”

By backing left-leaning nonprofits, the NEA has no assurance that it will get a
bang for its buck. Some of the groups have their own
alliances with the NEA’s arch-enemies, the school
reformers. Others have been hit by the kind of bad
publicity and allegations of wrongdoing that damages
credibility and ruins reputations. For instance, in
September 2009, the NEA was forced to issue talking
points to its affiliates explaining its relationship
with ACORN. Conservative activists had exposed the
group’s shady dealings. The union went so far as to
trot out its president, Dennis Van Roekel, who
pointedly insisted that his organization was
“stunned and appalled” by the “inexcusable actions.”

The fact that the NEA distributes so much money to a leftist group belies its
assertion that it is the leading voice for classroom
teachers. More often than not, the NEA’s
rank-and-file members aren’t fully informed about
the donations made in their name. This is why few
teachers object to their union’s contributions. No
doubt teachers were indifferent to their union’s
influence-buying as long as the NEA improved their
benefits and salaries. But as states and school
districts struggle through a fourth year of an
economic recession, confront astronomical budget
deficits and more than $1 trillion in unfunded
pension deficits, they can’t count on taxpayer
relief. And the NEA may no longer be able to count
on their members’ complacency or a steady flow of
their paid-in-full union dues.

NEA’s Philanthropy Strategygy

Teachers unions have long been generous in distributing their funds to
groups they regard as coalition partners. During the
Cold War, the AFT’s legendary president, Albert
Shanker, overtly funded anti-Communist projects in
Nicaragua and Poland. He helped the AFL-CIO form a
fund to help Lech Walesa and the Solidarity labor
union stare down Poland’s Communist leadership. A
founding member of the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE), Shanker understood the need for the AFT –
whose membership largely worked in the nation’s big
cities – to diligently build alliances with groups
outside public education. In Washington, D.C., for
example, the AFT affiliate cultivated ties to a
rising star, the now-disgraced Marion Barry. Their
partnership managed to nearly destroy the prospects
for high-quality academic instruction and student
achievement in D.C. schools.

(The former president of the AFT affiliate, Barbara Bullock, along with its
office manager, Gwendoylyn Hemphill, and former
treasurer James O. Baxter, were convicted of
diverting $5 million in union dues for an array of
luxury items and other gewgaws, including a
plasma-screen television and Rosendorf-Evans furs.)

By contrast, the NEA focused less on building ties to groups outside the
confines of public education. Founded in 1857 as a
professional association, and largely based in the
Midwest and suburbia, the union chose to influence
education policy and teacher compensation through
its relationship with the nation’s university
schools of educationon the training ground for most
teachers and administrators – and other elements of
traditional public education. This influence grew
exponentially starting in the 1960s, when states
began requiring school districts to collectively
bargain with NEA and AFT locals. Although lacking
the AFT’s fiery rhetoric, the NEA successfully won
lavish perks for its teachers – including
nearly-free health coverage and pension benefits
that could pay as much as $2 million over a
lifetime. The union forced school districts into
often-servile relationships in which it was the
union locals that shaped classroom instruction.

The NEA became especially skilled at using its vast financial resources to sway
state legislative and federal decision-making.
Between 1980 and 1994, its national donations to
congressional candidates increased from $400,000 to
$3.7 million, an eight-fold increase. With most of
these funds going to Democratic candidates and
incumbents, the union became a key player in the
party’s activist core. State and local affiliates
also masterfully used their campaign war chests and
rank-and-file members to sway legislators and school
board members their way. Until it went insolvent
last year, the NEA’s Indiana affiliate skillfully
built ties to the state’s politicians and
bureaucrats. It poured more than $1.5 million into
Hoosier State political campaigns during the
2007-2008 election cycle, making it the
single-biggest donor at the time. (The collapse of
the Indiana affiliate was chronicled in February by
Labor Watch.)

The NEA’s largesse extends to other members of the public education
establishment. It is a longtime donor to the
American Association of Colleges for Teacher
Education, the trade group for the nation’s
education schools. The union donated $252,262 to the
group in 2008-2009. Another player in teacher
training, the National Council for Accreditation of
Teacher Education, received $1.5 million from the
NEA between 2005-2006 and 2008-2009. These donations
cemented the union’s influence with education trade
associations.

However, during the past decade new organizations have emerged with a mission
to reform education policies at the federal, state
and local levels. These emerging forces have begun
to dilute NEA and AFT influence.

Taxpayer organizations are one such force. Starting in California in 1978,
taxpayer activists like the late Howard Jarvis and
others have introduced ballot initiatives to reduce
local property taxes, the major source of education
funding for most of the past century. The impact of
reduced levies on education finance occurred just as
state governments were being pressed by civil rights
activists and others to equalize school funding
levels between poor urban and wealthier suburban
districts. The states responded by paying for
ever-larger shares of school budgets. That in turn
aroused the interest of groups representing
business. They were paying taxes while wondering why
their young employees were so poorly equipped for
work.

The concern over deepening academic failure in the public schools led governors
like Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander to focus their
attention on new education issues. Curriculum
standards, textbook requirements, and testing
regimes became subjects of general political
discussion. By 1986, some 250 state and local panels
were at work on school reform. Big-city mayors and
young Democrats worried over the low quality of
instruction inside urban school districts. Starting
with Milwaukee with its school voucher program in
1990, mayors began taking over existing school
districts and launching charter schools. They
admired the energy and dedication of Teach for
America and other alternative teacher training
programs. During the 1990s, advocates for school
reform became increasingly vocal, and they attracted
the attention of more centrist Democrats such as
Arkansas governor and then-President Bill Clinton,
who worked to revamp education policy at the federal
level.

Where were the teacher unions? By 1997, the NEA’s public relations counselors,
the Kamber Group, implored the union to go into
“crisis mode.” The unions were urged to answer the
reformers and beat back their ideas. It didn’t work.
Four years later, school reformers, bolstered by the
election of George W. Bush, transformed the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act into the No
Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The law, with its
emphasis on using test scores and graduation rates
to measure school, student and teacher performance,
passed with bipartisan support. This included the
support of then-Sen. Edward Kennedy, a longtime
beneficiary of teachers union campaign
contributions.

Nonprofits Play Ball

Reeling from this public policy defeat and unable to stop the passage of
charter school laws across the country, the NEA has
re-focused its energies and changed its strategy. It
now aims to reshape public opinion about the
standard and accountability provisions of the No
Child Left Behind Act, which reformers touted as a
way to force states to measure and improve student
achievement. The NEA wants Congress to weaken or
erase the law (Congress is now holding hearings on
reauthorization this year). It backs the National
Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest) – whose
criticisms of standardized testing regimes are
widely quoted in the press; the NEA handed over
$150,000 to FairTest in 2008-2009. It also sponsored
a new group called Communities for Quality Education
(CQE), whose “educational advocacy” was shaped by a
board that included the heads of NEA affiliates. CQE
collected $8.7 million between the 2003-2004 and
20082009 fiscal years.

More importantly, the NEA has begun reaching outside the cozy circle of the
education establishment to build ties to other
elements within the Democratic Party’s activist
wing. Declared then-NEA President Reginald Weaver
during a 2006 event: “We have all kinds of
organizations that want this law changed. It’s just
a matter of the political climate.”

For instance, through CQE, the NEA partnered with the Civil Society Institute,
a Newton, Massachusetts environmental policy think
tank better-known for trying to shut down the
Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. The two created
a coalition that includes elements of Massachusetts’
education establishment. CQE and Civil Society
cobbled together Facing Reality, a 2005 report that
criticized No Child’s provision that all schools
make “Adequate Yearly Progress” toward enabling all
students to be “proficient” in English and
mathematics. Critics of the provision say that the
provision unfairly penalizes schools who are
otherwise doing well because they fail to improve
academic achievement for poor white, black and
Latino students. (The reality that many schools
ignore such students – and let them drop out – is
the very reason why many conservatives and centrist
Democrats have rallied around No Child in the first
place.).

The NEA also showers funds onto education research outfits that produced
reports favorable to the union’s opposition to
charter schools and to provisions of No Child Left
Behind. One outfit, the Civil Rights Project, has
proven to be reliable enemy of charter schools,
accusing them of fostering racial and economic
segregation. The NEA’s most-reliable partnership is
with the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which is
the union’s go-to source for research supporting its
talking points. Cofounded by an all-star group of
left-leaning economists that include Robert Kuttner
(cofounder of The American Prospect magazine and the
brains behind the Community Reinvestment Act) and
former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, EPI
primarily focuses on wage and employment issues. But
as the NEA bolsters funding for EPI, it has placed
more focus on education.

Between 2004-2005 and 2008-2009, the NEA poured more than $1.3 million into
EPI. In turn, the think tank has generated reports
and essays (including some published in the American
Prospect) declaring that test performance shouldn’t
be used in evaluating teachers and schools – a
cornerstone of No Child’s accountability measures –
and it even dared to proclaim that teachers unions
weren’t “an important impediment” in removing
laggard instructors from the classroom. EPI even
attempted to use faulty statistical data such as the
National Education Longitudinal Study – a U.S.
Department of Education survey with an extremely
limited survey population – and the U.S. Census
Bureau’s Current Population Survey (which doesn’t
track graduation rates over time) to disprove that
high schools had far more students dropping out than
annually reported.

By 2007, the NEA began to expand its donations to include groups with even
more-tenuous ties to public education. This includes
ACORN, which touts its role in voter registration
drives ahead of the 2008 elections. Between 2006-07
and 2007-08, the NEA donated $396,452 to ACORN in
hopes of putting the group’s “extensive grassroots
network and track record for mobilizing community
involvement” to its use. The goal? For ACORN to
rally the kind of low-income parents and traditional
defenders of public education who can oppose the
voter initiatives and school reform-minded
candidates that would adversely impact the NEA’s
agenda.

Another group receiving support from the NEA was the Mexican American Legal
Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), which
received $30,000 from the NEA in 2008-2009. It
signed on to the NEA’s “12-point joint action plan”
on stemming dropouts – a hodgepodge of suggestions
that includes funding universal pre-kindergarten
programs and expanding alternative high schools
(which research has shown actually encourages
dropouts).

The philanthropy strategy hasn’t worked as the NEA intended. One beneficiary,
the Schott Foundation for Public Education (which
received $30,000 in NEA dollars in 2008-2009)
advocates improving the data available on rates of
graduation and it wants to learn in what ways
academic failure contributes to high dropout rates
among black males. The NEA opposes these sorts of
proposals, arguing that this kind of data is
misleading and should not be used to evaluate
schools and teachers. Even MALDEF strongly opposes
NEA efforts to gut No Child Left Behind. It joined
together with La Raza, the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), NAACP,
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, and Citizens’
Commission on Civil Rights to support and strengthen
No Child. (Reauthorization proceedings for the law
are now in its third, protracted year.)

An even bigger recipient of NEA funding is the Center for American Progress
(CAP), the progressive think tank cofounded by
Clinton acolyte John Podesta. It collected $110,000
in NEA funds in 2008-2009. Yet CAP works with two of
the most active players in the school reform
movement – the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the
American Enterprise Institute – on a series of
report cards that applaud states for embracing
charters and alternative teacher training programs
and flunk those that stubbornly cling to the status
quo.

The NEA has beaten back ballot initiatives that would crimp its coffers either
by cutting school funding (forcing districts to lay
off dues-paying teachers) or by passing Right to
Work laws (allowing teachers to decline union
membership). The NEA learned from the experiences of
its California affiliate, which in 1988 secured
passage of a ballot initiative (Proposition 98)
requiring legislators to dedicate 39 percent of the
state budget to school funding. The national NEA has
poured money into helping other state affiliates set
up front groups to act as sock puppets for similar
goals.

In 2008-2009, the union gave $1.6 million to something called Coloradans for
Middle Class Relief. It helped defeat a ballot
proposal to restrict the collection of union dues
from non-union workers. Last year in Maine, the NEA
supplied nearly the entire budget of $680,426.73 for
Citizens Who Support Maine’s Public Schools, a
political action committee that defeated a proposed
taxpayer bill of rights and a proposal to reduce
Maine’s state excise tax.

Aiding Fellow-Travelersrs

The NEA spends its member dues as lavishly as it tries to spend taxpayer
dollars. Besides its contributions to nonprofits and
its campaign contributions, NEA leaders collect
handsome salaries averaging $110,000 a year. The
2008-2009 salary of Dennis Van Roekel, the NEA’s
current president, was $295,658. With almost no
funding dedicated to recruiting new members, the NEA
has little reason to exercise fiscal restraint.
Notes union-watcher Michael Antonucci: “There isn’t
any incentive for NEA to hang on to this money once
it is collected. The ballot initiative money gets
rolled over from year to year, but if the fund gets
too big people might want to reduce [their dues].”

The NEA must contend with the reality that large parts of the school reform
movement are embraced by left-leaning nonprofits as
strongly as they are by centrist Democrats,
conservatives and urban parents. This includes Rock
the Vote cofounder Steve Barr – who founded the
Green Dot chain of Latino-targeted charter schools –
and progressive pundit Matthew Yglesias. Groups such
as Schott, MALDEF and La Raza work in the very
neighborhoods whose public schools are little more
than dropout factories. They cannot help but be more
concerned about improving the quality of education
than supporting highly-paid teachers unions.

The philanthropy strategy further exposes the NEA to charges that it aids and
abets the worst excesses of left-leaning groups.
Besides the blow back for its ties to ACORN, the NEA
must now worry about its relationship with the
Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Foundation. The NEA
gave it $65,800 in 2008-2009. Last month, the
foundation and its PAC were subjects of a New York
Times report exposing its lavish spending – $700,000
to produce the caucus’annual gala. The Times also
disclosed that the CBC Foundation, a nonprofit arm
of African-American Democrats in Congress, gave
almost nothing in scholarships or other aid to the
communities its members are supposed to represent
and serve. Although the NEA hasn’t yet had to
publicly clarify its relationship with the caucus,
it’s unlikely that the teachers union is resting
easy.

NEA donations reveal that the union is not particularly concerned about the
opinions of its rank-and-file members. It says it is
the voice of average classroom teachers, but does
little to inform them about its giving and provides
inadequate public disclosure of its expenditures.
(The author reviewed NEA spending by examining its
LM-2 annual reports, which through the efforts of
former U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, are
available online at http://
www.dol.gov/olms/regs/compliance/rrlo/lmrda.htm.)

In 2008, for example, the NEA gave $260,000 to Citizens for Progress, one of a
string of advocacy groups run by Democrat
strategists Craig Varoga and George Rakis out of
their Washington,n,.C. Beltway offices. However,
those donations are labeled as “media” expenses in
the NEA filing with the U.S. Department of Labor.
The fact that the donations are so skewed toward
left-leaning groups means that NEA leadership is
ignoring the wide diversity of political thinking
within its ranks. An analysis by pollster Greenberg
Quinlan Rosner, for example, found that
rank-and-file teachers were far more wary of
President Obama’s health care reform plan than the
union’s national and state leadership.

Few NEA members have voiced opposition to the union’s political and
pseudo-philanthropic giving largely because the
union has successfully kept its promise of assuring
teachers that it will defend the traditional system
of degree- and seniority-based compensation,
near-lifetime employment and lavish retirement
benefits that have made teaching more lucrative than
any other public-sector profession. But no one now
can honestly make these promises. As states wrestle
with budget deficits and the cost of retiree
benefits for all civil servants, there are more
calls to end the generous deals. In New Jersey, Gov.
Chris Christie and the Democrat-controlled
legislature are unified in requiring teachers to
contribute 1.5 percent of their salaries to
healthcare benefits (school districts currently
cover those contributions). The NEA state affiliate
opposes this measly contribution. Thanks to the Bush
Administration’s No Child Left Behind Act and the
Obama Race to the Top initiative, there will be more
and more efforts to pass performance pay plans over
the objections of teachers unions. Young teachers,
who are less interested in tenure, may force the NEA
and AFT to back away from defending the status quo.

By the time it’s all said and done, the NEA may not have many alliances left.By
the time it’s all said and done, the NEA may not
have many alliances left.

RiShawn Biddle, editor of the education blog Dropout Nation, is co-author off
A Byte at the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post NCLB Eraa.